We’re celebrating true carnival style over here, but I am in the doghouse for doubling the weight of our rubbish for landfill this week with yogurt pots. 🙁

I’m just not getting over that procrastination monster regarding making my own yogurt. I made one pot this week, but, I have to be honest, I prefer the shop bought stuff. My home made yogurt is really thick and creamy – the kind of yogurt most people would wow over I should think (but then I’ve never been ‘most people’). The shop bought has more of a bite.

I know, I know, I could eat less of it, but I don’t know, yogurt to me is like, well, fill-in-the-blank for your own ‘can’t live without’ food and my inner yogurt addict is kicking and screaming every time I drag her to the yogurt maker.

So I’m struggling with it, but Mr Green’s face and look of disappointment this week really kinda touched me in one of those ‘I need to address this addiction’ ways. Also, it needs to be addressed before the fateful week at the beginning of September, when we step up to our zero waste week.

Mr Green was very good about it, but I could sense his sorrow as he jumped up for his job of ‘official squisher of rubbish’ with a “Just imagine what it would be this week if we didn’t have those yogurt pots”. (I can tell you, Mr Green, I’ve done the maths and weighing, SANS yogurt pots and you’ll be shocked, so I might keep that one to myself……….)

He has this thing every week with trying to make the rubbish as small as he possibly can with all sorts of creative ways. I think it brings out the Little Master Green within him. But look: the main part of our rubbish is squeezed into a 1kg rice bag!

Mr Green is doing SO well with our challenge. He’s made the decision to stop buying the Sunday meat he prefers; which comes wrapped in plastic, and will get some fresh from the butcher. He’s also figured the cheese wrapping issue, which I’ll talk about next week.

I am a long time supporter of the Green and Sustainable lifestyle. After being caught in the Boscastle floods in 2004, our family begun a journey to respect and promote the importance of Earth's fragile ecosystem, that focussed on reducing waste. Inspired by the beauty and resourcefulness of this wonderful planet, I have published numerous magazine articles on green issues and the author of four books.

Comments (8)

If you’ve only made one batch of yoghurt, it is too late to decide that your home-made yoghurt is not the kind you like! It’s like making raspberry jam, then giving up on jam-making because you prefer strawberry jam!

Try different kinds of milk, different starter cultures, and fermenting it for different amounts of time. Check the pot of your store-bought yoghurt for clues to what makes it different. After all the adventures you’ve had so far, a few adventures in yoghurt won’t hurt!

Well done Mr & Mrs Green…that’s amazing progress and Ruth is right. Try different things. For example, last week I put cold milk in my yoghurt make for the first time and it was so different to the yoghurt that’s made from boiled milk. I’m now going back to boiled! You’ve got plenty of time to experiment, but great going so far. ;-D

I’m now doing a frugal blog, but I just haven’t switched the recipe to my new site yet. :p I don’t use a yogurt maker at all…just some pots, canning jars, and a small cooler. The yogurt I make this way is a lot tastier than the stuff I tried making in the machine. Let me know if you try it and if you have any questions!

Hi Frugal Girl – thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. We’ve had a few new people this week visiting the site and it’s always great to hear what you have to say.

I will look at your experiences with making yogurt and let you know how I find it. Mr Green was asking me today when I next planned on making some. He keeps reminding me I only have 6 weeks to go before our zero waste week, so I need to get a move on and find something I really enjoy – yikes! Old habits die hard don’t they?

Yes, I found you from the No Impact Man. I hope that you have success with my recipe. I will warn you, the first time you make it, you will probably be like me and be thinking, “I am SO never bothering with that again!”. But once you’ve done it a few times, you will realize that it’s really very little hands-on work. And it reduces waste so wonderfully. I get my raw milk in glass jars from a farm(I wash them and return them each week), and then I use the glass canning jars for the yogurt. So, as long as I don’t break any jars, my yogurt causes no trash, which makes me really happy.

It sounds like you have a system that really works for you now, Frugal girl. Thanks for telling me how you found us too – it’s always good to hear about referrals from other sites.
It’s great that you can get raw milk in glass, locally too. We can get raw goats milk, but it’s frozen already and still comes in plastic.

Yes, I am so blessed! It’s a little farm, and they just keep one cow and sell the milk to my extended family. It’s only $4 a gallon too, which is about the price of hormone-laced, pasteurized milk in plastic jugs. Quite a bargain.